Divine Magnetic Lands by Timothy O'Grady

Author:Timothy O'Grady
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781407092904
Publisher: Random House

Interlude

Through the winter and spring I was in Valencia. One night in a bar an American asked me, ‘Do they hate us?’ A waiter in another place, he told me, had taken everyone else’s order before his, and this is how he interpreted it. He asked the question not with indignation or curiosity, but rather as though he’d been discovered in a transgression. In thirty years of living in Europe I hadn’t been asked such a question before. ‘It’s not that I’d blame them,’ he said.

On another night, in the same city, one of a group of American students on a tour of Europe had gone back to his hotel early, too depressed to continue his night out with friends. ‘We passed a group of Spaniards,’ one of them told me. ‘One made some kind of aggressive gesture towards us. It might have been aimed at somebody else, or it might have been a joke. But he thought it was because we were Americans. He thinks they despise us.’

Since I had been in Europe I had heard Europeans judge Americans to be bombastic, materialistic, naïve, poorly educated, excessively patriotic and lacking history, cuisine and culture. But they also watched America’s movies, listened to its music, wore its clothes, attended its universities, sought its counsel, admired its landscapes and its cities, yearned for its freedom and accepted its military protection and its cash. In the main they had an amused, paternalistic affection for the United States. And while the United States had overthrown governments elsewhere in the world, with Europe they had made treaties, set up cultural exchanges and study programmes, rebuilt infrastructure with Marshall Aid and other forms of assistance, celebrated common values, venerated Europe’s age and its beauty and despatched some of the best of its minds as advisors and diplomats. And they bore European mockery with good humour.

One of the gifts bestowed by the United States on many of its people has been an ease of manner, a confidence, even an insouciance at times, born out of the country’s wealth, power and progress and the desire of so many of the world’s people to come to it. But for this to be sustained the reception has to be hospitable. Such a sensibility curdles rapidly in the acid of others’ contempt. Confidence can turn into paranoia.

This seemed to begin to happen around the year 2003. As Europeans began to replace their amused affection with a view of America as an ungainly bully stumbling around with no agenda other than its own compulsion to dominate, many Americans felt first misunderstood, then unloved, then fearful, then outraged. Epithets of abuse about a cowardly and derelict Europe came from the American media and politicians. The little American consulate in Valencia began to feel it needed a police guard. Crash barriers, cameras and armed guards appeared around the embassy in London. America suddenly looked alone and defiant. Europe, and much of the rest of the world, was turning away from it, economically, politically,

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